ESP YOUR SIXTH SENSE by Brad Steiger

It's getting hard to tell all these Smith/Steiger volumes apart ...

At this point we might as well be pulling from an ur-text, something like Strange Hidden Powers of Your ESP From Beyond - With Ghosts! This particular title isn't so bad as an ESP primer, and it does have more of a structure than Steiger's raw Fortean texts. I just wish Brad hadn't already worn us down so much with his constant stream of cash-in books. This one expands on a lot of the same notes from his introduction to Warren Smith's Strange Powers of the Mind, with the purity of the "primitive" mind as an ESP receiver and the imminent melding of science and tradition into a unified new way.

Steiger selects from a wide and varied field of famous ESPers and investigators such as JB Rhine, Edgar Cayce, Eileen J. Garret, and Arthur Conan Doyle (again), with many citations from the Institute for Psychical Research. There's kookier stuff too, like a repeat performance by that biting bug-eyed monster from the Philippines and dumb ol' Jef the Talking Mongoose. Steiger even gets literary on us with a reference to William Golding's The Inheritors! Lest we give him too much credit, he also recycles the moldy old cases of Patience Worth and the Bell Witch Haunting, and relays a silly "experiment" involving a soap bubble, a telegraph key, and nested boxes - for all of Steiger's citations this time around, he still loves a good story above all else, whether or not it's verifiable in the least.

In more of that ghoulish psychic rubbernecking, Steiger claims that Dutch psychic Gerard Croiset "accurately described the area" where the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were buried after their 1964 lynching outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Croiset also astutely "implicated the local law enforcement officers as participants in the slayings," which honestly doesn't seem like an impressive deduction given the circumstances.

Going back to his theme of ESP in the Space Age, Steiger investigates the mind expanding potential of LSD, and digs up hints of big happenings in psychic research behind the Iron Curtain before finishing with the American Society for Psychical Research's 1965 "all-day ESP forum" in NYC. Messrs. Ullman and Krippner make an appearance as some sound and sober scientists engaged in scientific appraisals of ESP.

There's one final chapter in which Steiger instructs us on the use of Zener cards to test your own ESP potential. These iconic cards were created by psychologists JB Rhine and Karl Zener (natch) in the 1930s and have enjoyed a long lifespan in parapsychological research. Author John Sladek had some criticism of the cards:

It's astonishing that playing cards should have been chosen for ESP research at all. They are, after all, the instrument of stage magicians and second-dealing gamblers; they can be marked and manipulated in many traditional ways. At the best of times, card-shuffling is a poor way of getting a random distribution of symbols.

Zener cards, in color!

It's a fair cop, but also a fair go from Steiger this time. Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1970 (original pub. 1966)